Workshop 1: Introduction to video and audio annotation with ELAN

Presenter: Prof Heather Brookes

Date: 10 March 2023

Time: 8:30 - 12:30

Venue: Room - Somerset 2, Lord Charles Hotel, Somerset West

Max capacity: 30 participants

Eligibility: Workshop participation is open to attendees of DH-IGNITE at no cost. Limited space is available. Successful DH-IGNITE applicants will be invited to register for either one of the workshops.

What to bring: A laptop & audio/video data for transcription/annotation (data will also be provided by the organisers should you not have data available)

What to expect

Participants will gain experience in using ELAN to annotate video and audio recordings. No prior experience needed. With ELAN a user can add an unlimited number of textual annotations to audio and/or video recordings. An annotation can be a sentence, word or gloss, a comment, translation or a description of any feature observed in the media. Annotations can be created on multiple layers, called tiers. Tiers can be hierarchically interconnected. An annotation can either be time-aligned to the media or it can refer to other existing annotations. The content of annotations consists of Unicode text and annotation documents are stored in an XML format (EAF).

More about ELAN

ELAN (European Distributed Corpora Project Linguistic Annotator) is an annotation tool that allows users to create, edit, visualise and search annotations for video and audio data. ELAN is specifically designed for the analysis of language, sign language, and gestures, but it can be used for multi-media, video and/or audio data, for the purposes of annotation, analysis and documentation. More information on ELAN is available at: https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/

Workshop aim

The aim of the workshop is to introduce interested participants on the use of ELAN for the purposes of annotation, analysis, and documentation. Please note that this is an introductory workshop, and will only cover the basic functionality of ELAN.

Workshop format

The workshop will provide an introductory overview of ELAN, followed by a hands-on, interactive tutorial. Participants are encouraged to bring their own Audio/Video data along for transcription/annotation. Example data will also be available from the workshop organisers.

Participants who would be interested in attending

Scholars, lecturers, and researchers working with audio or video corpora interested in annotating and analysing corpora.

Topics that will be included

• Key concepts in ELAN
• ELAN Documents
• Annotating data in ELAN
• Tiers and types
• Segmentation
• Annotations
• ELAN tutorial

Workshop outcome

After conclusion of the workshop, participants will be able to start an audio or video annotation project in ELAN, create templates, and annotate or transcribe data in ELAN.